Month: June 2010

In my previous post “A Little Byte of Romance”, I pointed out some points (uhm… nevermind that) of criticism of “The Witcher”, about it being a game that forces you to be either asexual or sexist with not too much in between. In the meantime, I continued playing. And I tell you, that pale bastard Geralt grows on ya. Especially if you’re “Whiter than White” yourself. I am one of those very white people, due to my cells being unable to produce enough pigment. Sadly – and just in case you’re wondering – I cannot work magic like Geralt. 😉

He’s a cynic, pale as a corpse, scarred, mutant, outcast loner. (Oh and he’s amnesic, which guarantees for some funny dialogs.) When you walk around town as Geralt, people curse and call you names, tell you to stay away so they aren’t associated with you – or shout out warnings for the women (mmmkay, in his case, the latter REALLY is advisable!). And while in real life, this name-calling rarely happens to me personally, I know enough people with albinism (who are even whiter than me) who suffer greatly from it.

Non-player-characters often try to persuade you to turn against the humans based on this discrimination. Unlike in romantic matters, you often have very nuanced answers to these attempts to incite racist hatred. So I’m thinking… while The Witcher doesn’t allow me to play and act as a woman, it does allow me to play as an outcast who doesn’t dwell on his victimhood – and I quite like that!